Grumpyrocker

Hope you have fun with it. Really enjoyed building my system a couple of weeks ago. Not done it for a while.

How very sad of you to drag the thread down again. It was a metaphor, understand that? You don't know anything at all about me or experience with incubators or what possible connotations they have had in my life, my late wife or my children. All I see is someone who seems - for no reason I can tell - out to get me. Believe me it really takes a lot more to phase me than some internet bully. I've not forgotten the PM. I'm here to talk about this latest ORBX product. This is the fifth ORBX product and the only one I have a problem with. I have consistently explained my position with examples of my problems with my product and the obvious poor customer service from ORBX. I was genuinely shocked by my treatment at ORBX because as far as I knew the company had an exemlary record. Certainly the products this far had been great, as had But you aren't interested are you? You don't want me to discuss this product. I don't really understand why. But then having worked in both the internet and videogames industry for the last 14 years I tend not to be surprised by the behaviour of trolls. Fine, you don't want me to be here. You don't like me. You want to bully me. I can't be bothered. Got more important things to do. I'm going to read my children a bedtime story, uninstall ORBx England, start a paypal dispute then finish up my review of FTX England for my day job. Have a nice life. Shan't be chatting with you again.

Awwww bless your cotton socks. **** Right. Back onto the topic. Just tried FTX ENG again for the first time in a few days and found the area around Boscombe Down doesn't seem to betray the landlcass landslip that I've seen further south. Which makes it seem even more likely there's one chunk of the landclass (at least) that somehow got shifted in development. I wonder if the whole thing is a simple case of one number being fed in a tool somewhere that moved a whole region slightly off its moorings. That being said - that doesn't cover the sloppy haphazard bridges and other objects, but would at least explain the odd autogen problems. (thanks for the User Award BTW whoever gave me that!)

You can save a lot of money for going for an i5 3570K instead of an i7. For most uses - especially gaming - you'll notice no difference. i7 comes into its own for multithreading applications but unless you're planning to do lots of high end video editing and the like then you won't see the benefit. RAM is cheap, so 8GB minimum. I've just built a new system and put 16GB, just because it was inexpensive and I sometimes use high memory music software. But 8GB is a good figure to go for. As far as the GPU goes it really depends on the resolution you are planning to use. For 1080p then you don't need to go above a 660ti - the MSI Power Edition version of that card runs a mere six percent below a 670 for much less money and can be easily overclocked to match a 670. Good review here. If you are planning to run over 1080p with lots of full screen anti-aliasing then the 670 may be beneficial. Read the review I linked to and look at the benchmarks as it includes the 670.

[deleted] /gives up

Amazing really. The rest of the games industry really wouldn't get away with that. Seems many flight sim devs use their forum as advertising. They want to present a happy forum full of satisfied customers as testament to the quality of the product. Renders a forum pointless - they may as well have a testimonials page instead.

Yes I could. But I realised I didn't want to read pages and pages of "Oh ORBX England is so great. I can't see what those silly people are criticising it for. It's so wonderful. You're new team isn't poorly trained and badly managed and has done such a great job. Those critics don't understand Flight Simulator and just want to see their own house in Flight Simulator. John, John my darling, have more of my money for your substandard products, kissy, kissy, kissy."

I only noticed the time when the few days were up. Suddenly realised it wasn't a date in November 2012, but 2013. My three year old has better control of his temper than John at ORBX.

"This is the first baby incubator from this medical company, so please don't complain if your baby isn't too happy." Yup. Charming isn't it?

Shush. It's people like you what cause unrest. Who said anything about perfect? Not complete with a massive error is an entirely different thing. Thank goodness that the customers of Boeing and Airbus don't think like that. Wings? Wings? No we're adding them in a patch later. I'm amazed that so many companies have apologists that are happy for them to release unfinished products, then actually attack paying customers for dissatisfaction. There seems something very wrong with that. No wonder the Flight Sim market is dying compared to ten years ago. It's become a ghetto with people happy to buy substandard products and defend to the hilt the companies willing to release them. Believe me such shoddy work would not stand in the mainstream games industry. Bethesda has rightly been completely lambasted for the poor quality of its PlayStation 3 version of Skyrim. I didn't see people popping up saying "oh people always complain, you can't expect games to be perfect". It just doesn't fly in the world outside this strange little forgotten corner of gaming that is flight sims.

I knew what I was buying too. I just wanted the landclass...you know...to be in the right place not a couple of miles away. For hundreds of square miles in the south west (and more widespread for all I know) the landclass is shifted away from the point it should be on the mesh and roads. As though a whole section has a simple error - rather than each village/town being placed wrongly. See what I mean? Like somewhere a whole section of the project got moved slightly in comparison with others. The places that are clearly wrong all seem to be the same distance and the same direction from where they should be. Which makes it seem this was the case, rather than individuals placing villages in the wrong place. They all seem the right distance apart, it's just like when one of my children pulls the table cloth a bit and all the place settings aren't quite where they should be. They didn't touch any of the plates, but now nothing is where it should be. It would have been just as easy or difficult for these things to be where they should be. Putting them where they should be is not a big ask, it is not asking for FSX to be rewritten or something amazing to occur like unicorns defecating rainbows across the sky. No, it would require the same accuracy and skills to place the landclass layer where it should, than where it shouldn't. The only thing it that would be different is that someone checked it, you know, to see if it wasn't completely wrong again. I think I have some kind of force field around me that prevents anyone actually reading the things I say. I explain my position and folks keep going "But mate, your house isn't going to be in the game". I give up. I'm a bit narked because I spent some money on FTX ENG and my house isn't in the game. I can't see my car or my garden. I thought this thing was going to be accurate. Surely my house should be in the game. ORBX is evil, my house isn't in the game. Or my local supermarket, or my shed. I wanted to fly around in tiny little circles just above my house, tight little circles so I could watch my virtual garden grow, but now I can't because ORBX is evil.

Sad really. Oh well. Will launched Paypal dispute I think. And writing something more visible elsewhere too.

Oh believe me they won't get another penny from me. The Flight Sim Store sent me an email this week advertising FTX England. It included as a feature "- Hand placed super-accurate autogen"

Just discovered my "temp" forum ban from ORBX for daring to question the quality of FTX ENG is a whole year. Yes folks, the boss of the company really is that childish. I wonder what the consumer rights law on this is. Essentially I'm being denied the regular avenue to technical support for a product I have paid for. Perhaps I should seek a refund if the company is not willing to offer future support to my purchase.

You were the one that called these errors "bugs". I thought rather than correcting your terminology I should just continue with the meat of the conversation. I was assuming you would understand, given you are the one who used that word. Clearly I was wrong as you've flung your word back in my face and then gone on to be insulting. I shall leave it there.

ORBX has admitted to them. Those things you don't think are there. Well done.

I wonder how often one has to say it. No one is requesting local VRP navigational detail. Look. A company sells a product that aims to add feature X and feature Y to FSX. Feature X and feature Y are supposed to be in exactly the same place. In the new software in a very large area feature X is offset by some distance from feature Y. In effect each location appears twice, once in the form of feature X, the other as feature Y. This is a mistake that the company admits to. It's that simple. Meanwhile other companies are selling products where feature X and feature Y do appear at the same place as they should. And no I don't mean photoscenery.

That's true Paul. But the reason I quoted that particular part - was this was the bit that was insulting and misrepresenting the criticisms It wasn't my aim to be selective in the pejorative sense - merely to show the part of John's reply I had a real beef with. I was cross not because there were errors in the scenery - though this was disappointing - but because of the way John sought to dismiss the criticism as being "a parochial desire from UK customers to see their local "right" and they are getting the rude awakening about a landclass-based scenery product - you'll never ever see your house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate etc" when in fact it was nothing of the kind. Several of us actually went out of our way to explain that we understood the limitations of FSX but our issues were not related to that. John ignored this. The irony was that in the support forum screenshots and details of such errors were welcome, yet John was acting like none of these were valid in the general forum. Paying customers have a right to say this product doesn't feel complete or properly tested without being told they aren't allowed such opinions are they wrong, but they don't even understand what the product does in the first place. I don't earn much money. I try to spend it wisely. EU ENG represents all my spare cash for the next few weeks. Believe me if I'd bought any other piece of software that was in such a shoddy state I would have asked for a refund right away. Until John made his ridiculous reply I was willing to give ORBX the benefit of the doubt. But now I doubt the company's motivations, honesty and ethics - this product was not ready for release. I will be patching EU ENG when an update is released. But i won't be spending another penny with the company. I should add that since yesterday, without posting there again, I've been suspended from the ORBX forum - I suspect due to this thread. So John's childish behaviour extends beyond what happens on his own forum.

In fairness to ORBX I think you've got some other landclass product showing through. This is what I see... Though really ORBX should have done a better job of excluding scenery below.

How embarressing for you. Caught out lying and misrepresenting another forum member. Of course you will not be able to substantiate any of your accusations with quotes. I will accept your apology. What I want is very simple. And most other scenery manages this. That towns and roads are in the same place. It really is simple. Ultimate Terrain manages it. Infact even the default scenery manages it. The road network in EU Eng is pretty accurate. And the company has added many towns and small villages. Alas the towns in many cases have not been put in the correct location and so are not in the right place on the mesh and are offset away from the roads. The result is villages and towns appear twice, once as vector roads, then again as autogen. This is a simple error. One that ORBX team members in the support forum have aknowledged and have requested screenshots and co-ords of to help fix it. In the picture below you can see the road network of the village. It is in the correct position in the mesh. But you can see the landclass has not been placed correctly and is moved onto a hill where in reality it does not reside. This is not a limitation of the sim and is something other scenery - including other ORBX products - gets right. This is merely a matter of error checking and testing. All we want is for ORBX to maintain the accuracy that (1) other scenery designers manage as routine (2) the company itself claims to represent. Not all the landmarks from each village. Just simple - landclass positions without very obvious errors over a very large area. There are hundreds of square miles like this, where essentially towns and villages appear twice, like ghosts of each other. Even if you've never visited this real place below, you only have to look to see it's wrong, and quite ugly too. Certainly not up to the standard of ORBX Australian scenery. Another example would be the Lake District. This mountainous areas features high peaks without trees or buildings. However in the ORBX scenery - unlike Ultimate Terrain - the region is shown with buildings and trees at high altitudes. Again, not unrealistic expectations from customers, just us not wanting to put up with very silly errors. It really is that simple. Look at these two pictures. The top one is Ultimate Terrain, the second ORBX. The UT scenery has the village of Winsham placed along the road as should be. ORBX has it some distance away up a hill. See, not a limitation of the sim. Just an error. Perhaps one that is widespread because some whole file is offset from another, rather than individual villages being placed incorrectly. You may also notice more detail from UTX including a stream. These are correct. I'll accept your apology now.

Ultimate Terrain X Europe. Certainly has much better urban landclass placement in my part of the country. I did tell John he was being unfair for putting words into my mouth. Maybe that was my great sin.

I completely forgot about that when I linked. Yes the forums are private. Here's the cut and paste of the post I made there which resulted in the childish "warning". It starts with me quoting the boss. "John Venema, on 18 November 2012 - 03:08 PM, said: What we are witnessing here is simply a parochial desire from UK customers to see their local "right" and they are getting the rude awakening about a landclass-based scenery product - you'll never ever see your house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate etc - simply because landclass tiles are 1km x 1km squares and as a result it is impossible to get it as accurate as a fully-photoreal product." I was quite sad to see this response John. Yours is a straw man argument. I haven't noticed any posts here complaining that our "house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate" isn't in the scenery. Trying to deflect people with this kind of comment really isn't fair to your customers. I see plenty of posts saying that there are major errors in landclass placement - a genuine problem with this release. Choosing to argue with an issue no one has raised does no one any favours. not least ORBX. Again as I've said elsewhere referring to the FSX default scenery to compare this release to is spurious. You aren't competing with the default scenery for customers' money. They already have Flight Simulator installed already. ORBX is competing with products such as Ultimate Terrain. That is who you have to do better than, not the original developer of Flight Simulator X. Ultimate Terrain may not have as much granular details as ORBX usually offers in its products. Certainly in the hundreds of square miles around where I live there are villages not featured due to their small size that ORBX has decided to feature. However the difference is that in the Ultimate Terrain scenery the villages and towns that are included ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE and match the location of the UTX own vector roadways. This is not a "limitation of the simulation" as keeps being bandied around here. Ultimate Terrain right now, despite covering a much larger area has the towns, villages, roads and railways located more accurately than EU ENG. It may not be as pretty - unless one invests in a texture product such as Ground Environment X - but it is more accurate. And that's something many of us didn't expect at all. I'm sure there are a few UTX customers here that bought EU ENG precisely because we've been WOWED by THE BRILLIANCE of your other products John and expected EU to be a quantum leap over the UT product. Certainly in the case of PNW it is miles better than Ultimate Terrain. I've been a professional (in that I get paid for it rather than any judgement of my ability) videogames journalist for the last 14 years and I've seen plenty of software that's failed to live up to expectation in that time. I've seen promises broken. I also have a fair handle on the abilities and limits of software and technology. I'm sorry to say that EU ENG doesn't live up to the promise and has some glaring errors that I wonder how they got through development and testing. Anyone with a map to hand could have flown around southern and south west England and seen that the roads and towns/villages don't match and that it's the latter that are in the wrong place. And then there are the variant road colours and road junctions that don't even match each other. Again I've seen some folks here say you can't expect your own street to be right, but despite your post no one is asking for that. What I would like is that someone at ORBX checked, cared, whatever that the towns and villages in many places are placed in the wrong location and not in the same place as the roads. It's not a limitation of the sim, they are in the wrong place. And it makes me sad. Sad that people try to explain this as a limitation of FSX, sad that ORBX products - of which I've invested over £100 in - are usually better than this, sad that no-one spotted this in development, sad that no one spotted it in testing, or sad that in the end someone spotted it and didn't care enough to fix it. If it didn't matter where these things really are then you could have recreated the map of Mordor and sold it to people around the world as a fair representation of a place they have never visited. But did you not think some Brits would buy it? And was not your aim to actually get these things right? I expect you did. You have in your other scenery. You've set very high standards. Award winning standards. And rightly so. But not so here. Now I don't expect my road to be in the game (the vector road past my house actually is). And anyway I've no vested interested in this place. I'm from hundreds of miles north and have only lived here six months. But I've lived long enough to know hundreds of square miles of this area in EU Eng is just plain wrong. And for all I know the whole country suffers from similar problems. Though I've seen fewer such problems in the north west. The reason i raise them about this area of Dorset and Somerset is because I've driven enough around here recently to have a good memory of the place. But honestly, all it takes is a map and an aerial view in FSX to spot all this stuff - didn't anyone do this in testing? It's so obvious when you see little roads networks of villages and meanwhile the village is a mile away up a hillside. Now I've paid my money. I don't want a refund. I'm happy to wait for the software to be completed - though in the meantime I'll be using a rival product. But what I'm not happy about is being deflected with nonsense about this being the fault of FSX, or unrealistic expectations of customers, or being told I'm moaning because my local pub isn't in the software. It is plain insulting. One might expect it from loyal fans of the products, but not from the developer. Now I've been nice and shown screenshots and pointed out errors - errors over hundreds of square miles that frankly really shouldn't have made it through the beta - I want to help, I want the product to get better. But if we're being told we're just moaners wanting our "local supermarket" in the sim, ie being completely misrepresented and insulted, then I'm happy for this to be my last post. I'll discuss these issues in my day job instead and wait eagerly for the patches that hopefully fix what increasingly (the more I fly the more I see) unfinished and sadly shoddy product. Good luck with it John, I honestly am rooting for it to get fixed. (though not in the Aussie sense)

It's so odd Bob (BTW just changed my username) that they have folks posting there who blindly follow the faith. Actually following the same line - "critics are just expecting photoscenery level detail" - flipping heck it's just some DLC for a videogame, not Scientology.

I hadn't realised this Swolford. I've bought five of their products previously - all four Australian regions and Pacific North West. All of those I was very happy with. And I thought it would be fine to discuss problems with the new England scenery. Because it really does have lots of problems. My input in several threads had been welcomed as I posted screenshots of problems. But not only did John Venema misrepresent and insult customers' points of view, he then locked the topic and to add insult to injury made some wild (and very wrong assumptions) about my attitude and put words into my mouth. Then he sent me the childish little message you see above. I'm only sad I knew they were such a poor company to deal with before I spent any money. Well, no more. The truth is that EU ENG is pretty ropey in places. Some awful landclass placement and the road construction, with mismatched surfaces and poor joins that are really below the company's usual standards. Just trying to silence people in the forum is counter productive as folks will talk elsewhere and perhaps to larger audiences. You are assuming (1) These are problems with the flight simulator itself, not some poor work. If this was true then other rival products wouldn't have already been more accurate in the same locations. (2) That no one criticising hasn't had some experience of flight sim scenery development or understand the real limitations of the sim. Please don't make the same mistake as ORBX as making straw man arguments against critics.

Seeing as they closed the thread on the official forum I thought I would post how disappointed I am with EU ENG here. Didn't realise ORBX had a reputation for such behaviour. This was in a thread about innacurate autogen placement. See in my part of the country there are hundreds of square miles where the autogen landclass for the towns/villages is misplaced - ie it's usually a good distance from the roads from the same places. It's pretty shoddy and should have been caught in development. Crikey just been sent this because of my reasonable points I linked to: "You have been given a warning by John Venema. Reason: Abusive Behaviour ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You should know better. Don't argue with the management. Our house our rules." That's the last penny they get from me then. How awfully childish of them. Still, will make for some good copy.